Is 4K UHD & HDR Worth It For Gamers? - Rerez Talks

4K televisions are definitely the future but what a lot of people don't seem to realize is that the future is probably coming a lot sooner than they think. Now before we begin I do want to state one thing upfront. Personally I prefer higher frame rates to higher resolutions so if I'm ever playing a PC game that the resolution needs to be dropped down just a little bit in order to get a higher frame rate well I'm always gonna pick that option. But that doesn't mean that I don't play games at 4K resolutions because I do and the games out there that I have played at high resolutions usually have pretty big benefits to playing them that way. Higher resolutions can give you more details and textures, sharper edges on the polygons and just a whole bunch of things going down in the image that makes it look so much better. But visual quality alone isn't the only benefit you get. It can also affect the way you play the game as well. A higher resolution means that you can pick out details in the environment that other gamers might not be able to see so if you're playing a game at 1080p and you're playing with somebody that's playing at 4K the chances are that if you're playing a first-person shooter and you're far away from each other in the game they may be able to see you because the 4K screen they're using is giving them far greater detail in a smaller packed environment of pixels. And first person shooters aren't the only genre that can benefit from a higher resolution. If you're ever playing an RTS or some kind of MOBA game having the ability to have a larger resolution means you can see more of the playing field and although some games have a fog of war and stuff like that the ability to see more map is always a benefit for any gamer out there. Most of my 4K gaming experiences have been limited to just the PC because well my PC is a little bit more powerful than my home consoles are. And unfortunately the one console I do have that's capable of actually playing 4K games is the PlayStation 4 Pro which isn't a bad system or anything but the way it does 4K isn't really true 4K.

The PlayStation 4 Pro utilizes a technique called checkerboard rendering which essentially renders the video game image at a much smaller resolution and then it kind of upscales it to make it look like it's 4K and although it really isn't the image is still a lot better than what you get off a traditional 1080p image. Not every single PlayStation 4 Pro game utilizes checkerboard rendering but the majority of them do and unfortunately it's just something that isn't true 4K. For a ton of gamers out there the PlayStation 4 Pro looks good enough but that's not the only reason why people picked up the PlayStation 4 Pro. A lot of these 4K televisions also offer something called High Dynamic Range. Every single PlayStation 4 on the market, even if it's not a pro, has the ability to project HDR images. And while the original Xbox One can't the Xbox One S can and predictably so will the Xbox One X. Brought down to its most basic level High Dynamic Range essentially is just really bright objects look really clear and really dark objects also look clear when they're on the exact same screen. I've personally taken two Xbox One S consoles and sat them beside each other on two TVs, one had HDR and the other one didn't, and there was a noticeable difference. And that separation between those two images gets even bigger when you include 4K resolutions.

So with all that being said the PlayStation 4 Pro is already on the market and the Xbox One X is going to be arriving very soon. So my prediction is going to be that 2018 is going to be the year that 4K blows up. In May of 2017 the Consumer Technology Association announced that 16 per cent of US households already owned a 4K TV. That same organization also made a prediction that by the end of 2018 there was going to be 25 million 4K TV sets in households in the US with a grand total of 300 million sets in households worldwide. Now I'm likely to believe this association for multiple reasons. One of them being they're a lot smarter than me but if you ignore that fact well personally I went to go buy a 4K TV and I discovered something very interesting — 4K TV sets are getting ultra cheap. When someone that's interested in buying a brand new TV goes to a store or shops online they're likely going to find a lot of 4K TV sets coming at a price range that they could probably consider reasonable. Why are consumers going to buy 4K even if they don't have 4K on their mind? Well if you go to a Best Buy right now and try to get an old-style CRT TV well you wouldn't find one because they don't really sell them anymore. And nowadays it's getting really hard to find flat-screen televisions that are standard definition. Pretty much everything on the market is HD usually 720p or higher. And now 4K TVs are coming down to a price point that makes high-definition televisions obsolete. What I think is going to happen in 2018 is that there's going to be a lot of people out there probably going for larger screen televisions and instead of just buying a high definition TV limited at 1080p well for a little extra they're just gonna buy 4K naturally because those options are more readily available and lowering in price every single moment. And if somebody's going to get a really big screen TV the chances are they're probably gonna be up sold on a 4K model especially if they're going into a store or they find a really good deal online. Another factor in 4K TVs becoming even cheaper right now is there's a whole bunch of 4K TVs on the market that are LED based and basically that's the older style of technology they use to backlight the screens and make the TV bright enough to look at. Now there's a new line of TVs that utilize a technology called OLED and essentially what that means is every single pixel on your screen can light itself up meaning that really dark sequences where you have a shadow or something will look really, really black. This is a huge advantage to anyone that wants a TV for HDR because with this kind of screen technology you're gonna be able to see details you've never seen before. So with OLED 4K TVs coming onto the market at the same time that current 4K TVs already exist well you're just gonna start to see the older ones come down in price a lot faster as everyone tries to sell those newer ones.

Combined with the release of the Xbox One X and the already existing PlayStation 4 Pro there are going to be a lot of consumers out there that are going to be getting into 4K one way or the other. And for them it might just be an upgrade that they just passively get into which is kind of cool. I feel that the biggest moments in technology are the ones that people just naturally get into and aren't up sold on it. So I think this is the best way for 4K to come onto the market and why I personally believe that 2018 is going to be the year that 4K finally makes its big impact.

Follow me on Steemit @Rerez for more gaming posts!